What’s the best way to drive traffic to your blog these days? …
Write an entry about your Google job interview. Recently I’ve found yet
another one
of those. This one is actually well written and quite interesting, so
go read it first. Today, I wanted to focus on another issue, though —
if you read comments for
this article on Reddit, 90% of them seem to be from people complaining
about the number of interviews he had to take. This is
counterintuitive. You do NOT want to work for company
that hires people after 30 minute chat, simply because there’ll be lots
of bad apples there. Google’s process may seem long, but it’s not that
bad actually (first you have phone interviews which take maybe 40-50
minutes max, then there’s an on-site visit, which takes one day and
consists of several interviews).
(Sidenote: This is a first-hand experience, actually, I wasted
my chance to pimp this blog and didn’t write a detailed report, but I
had Google interviews as well some years ago… 2 days after the third
one, I got hit by a car, self preservation instinct says I shouldn’t
apply again).
Why is Google’s process so careful? Because they can. I’d love to
have possibility of performing recruitment in similar fashion, but it
just doesn’t seem possible in gamedev, not to this extent at least.
Companies struggle to get experienced folks as it is. After 50 talks
with people, who rate their C++ knowledge at 9, then fail to solve the
most basic tasks, someone who actually coded a game before is a
Godsend. Dragging him through 8 interviews and risking he’ll go
somewhere else doesn’t sound smart. It’s my experience only, but it
seems like interviews in mainstream companies are 2 leagues above
anything you can encounter in gamedev. Google’s interview is hard, but
also interesting and challenging, definitelly something different than
the usual: “what have you done before? Oh, nice… Mmm, oh, right, what’s
101011 in decimal? Good. When can you start?”. Beggars cant be
choosers. If you’ve more candidates than you can shake your stick at —
it’s your right to be extra picky (see old Steve Yegge’s essay
how it works for Google [yeah, again]). It mostly boils down to one
simple factor: how many people want to work for your company and see it
as a privilege, some kind of industry Holy Grail. There are probably GD
companies in this kind of luxury situation, but it’s very rare.
Ironically, in certain aspects, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If
you’re picky about your candidates and only employ the best of the
best, word will get around and smart people will treat your company as
some kind of a “benchmark” (”they only get super smart folks, so if I
get there, I’m super smart as well”). Just having an interview, even
when you’re not hired (well, especially if you’re not hired, it seems)
will become something that’s worth writing a report about. Sure, it
will take time and sacrifices, but may pay off in a long term.
Original story